Wolfram|Alpha, a very impressive new “computational knowledge engine”, went live on Friday. It allows you perform mathematical and scientific equations, from simple to complex, and to search for a variety of factual and scientific data. There is a must-see introduction video that gives many examples of what you can do, some of which are truly amazing.  It is clearly a very powerful and immensely sophisticated tool. For some types of searches, it is actually a better tool than Google.
This has led many people, including myself, to wonder whether this could be a serious competitor to Google, or change the way search is done. No doubt, there are some searches that will be better served by Wolfram. That alone leads me to believe that Google could lose some search volume to Wolfram. The question is how much, and what kind of searches. I imagine the loss will be small, at least for now. First, Wolfram is NOT a search engine.  Try doing a search on Wolfram for “top law schools” or “guacamole recipe” – it does not know what to do with queries like that (yet). Second, Google already has basic computational abilities built in like a calculator and measurement conversions (though few people seem to know about them). Thirdly, I estimate that the number of searches that would be better presented by WolframAlpha is comparatively small, as they are limited mostly to scientific queries. Additionally, those types of searches do not seem likely to be the kind that attract a lot of advertisers, and thus would have a lesser impact on Adwords revenue.
But just the fact that there now exists a site that is actually much better than Google for some searches is groundbreaking. For example, if you search “mortgage 5% 30 years” on Wolfram, you immediately get presented with an excellent mortgage calculator. That definitely beats searching “mortgage calculator” on Google and getting back a list of links to sites that are typically crammed with advertisements.  It is a great way to get direct answers to some questions without having to sort through a list of websites that may or may not contain what you are looking for. Though I am sure that the owners of those sites are not at all happy about the prospect of losing traffic to Wolfram.
Overall, this is an exciting development and a monumental achievement by the folks at WolframAlpha. How it impacts the search landscape remains to be seen. But for some, it will certainly prove to be an immensely useful tool.
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